Set in an icy, fantasy Norse-influenced world, with an art style based on the 1950s work of Disney artist Eyvind Earle, The Banner Saga is immediately, aesthetically, vastly different from most videogame fare. But it's not just in visuals that it strikes out.

The Banner Saga's key innovation is in making the player feel far less heroic. This isn't about saving the universe, it's about surviving the next battle.

It is amazing what canny developers can now do, in terms of visuals, on mobile devices. Archangel's makers proudly trumpet its near-console level of graphical pizzazz and they're right to. Sadly, in copying console games' visual acuity, Archangel's makers seem also to have copied console games' general lack of imagination.

A mine haunted by spriguns, an orphan menaced by a stranger who vanishes at will and the shadow cast over a village by the Black Death. Each is the backbone for the three films gathered on Scary Stories, the BFI’s fourth collection drawn from the archives of the Children’s Film Foundation (CFF). Although aimed at children, around an hour long and made with limited budgets, these subtle, well-crafted films sold no one short. All three are packed with shocks – and still pack punches for children of all ages.

Losing your pet mouse would be distressing enough. But misplacing the white rodent on a school trip to the Tower of London is beyond careless. It’s downright irresponsible. But that’s routine compared with turning yellow and then encountering a man who travels via the electric current he feeds from. Obviously, the errant school kid ends up set for a beheading in the Tower. All of which happens to John in The Boy Who Turned Yellow, a 1972 Children’s Film Foundation (CFF) production that’s bizarre, even by their eccentric standards.

If JJ Abrams's first shot at reinventing the Star Trek franchise in 2009 was a memorable coup de cinéma, blending a plausible back story with a fresh cast imbued with the spirit of the TV originals, this follow-up is more about consolidation. There's bags of vertiginous interstellar action, retina-scorching 3D effects and earth-in-peril terror, though by the time you totter from the multiplex 130 minutes older, you may be asking yourself where the big payoff went.

What if John Lennon had left The Beatles in 1962? What if they had continued without him? And what if he had still become the acid-tongued, ready-with-a-quip character the real world became familiar with? Snodgrass took those what-ifs and ran with them to depict a parallel world that was less the “hilarious comedy drama” trailed by Sky and more a gloomy, slightly creepy oddity made even more so by Ian Hart’s deft, second-nature portrayal of a Lennon floundering on life’s scrapheap.

We hear ghastly, otherworldly shrieks and human screams over a black screen, which then fades to white and the sight of a man running for this life through a snowy wilderness. As he approaches a seated figure, he cries out, “friend”, only to find the poor chap holding his own head in his lap.

We're at a moment of change in games – new consoles, new ideas, new ways of playing. And what better game to usher out one era and in a new one than BioShock Infinite?

This first-person shooter is still wedded to the core mechanics of traditional big-budget console gaming, but layered on top of a core of classic run-and-gun is a series of innovations in terms of character, script, gameplay and scope of theme that point to exciting potential future directions for the next generation of games.

If you go down to the woods today, it’s possible a Huldra might be encountered. A Norwegian wood, that is. She goes by other names across Scandinavia, but this be-tailed woman is to be avoided. Men lured into her lair are never seen again. Thale turns the legend on its head and tells the tale of Thale, a Huldra who’s been captured by a man and imprisoned in his basement. The story of the Siren-like Huldra is one that’s ripe for a film treatment, especially after Norway’s Troll Hunter became an international hit. Unfortunately, Thale is somewhat undercooked.

In Post Tenebras Lux (light after darkness, in Latin) Mexican writer-director Carlos Reygadas casts a spell which transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. The human condition is eye-poppingly explored in this ambitious, sometimes puzzling work of visual poetry, buoyed by the innocence of children and mired in the contrasting anxieties of their parents. Whether it's sexual neurosis, the natural world, or kids at play it's all too beautiful.